Sometimes, the packing is the real expedition. Forget the trip. The trip isn’t the issue. The trip isn’t even the adventure. In fact, the trip is the vacation you need just because of all the packing and the planning and the getting it to fit in the car.

Especially in a pandemic. When, after several months of social distancing in your house – venturing out only to buy groceries and see if the sky is still blue – you decide to take the family away from home. To a rented house in the North Carolina mountains. Easy to get to. You can take everything you need. You know the area. And you can spend all your time socially-distanced on trails and out-of-the-way places where hopefully no coronavirus will show its face … because of bears.

But … sometimes, the packing is the real expedition. Sometimes, getting ready is so exhausting that you need an extra day just to recover from it all. Before you can go out and try to enjoy yourself. You need that time to recover from the planning. The loading. The fear that it would burst your car at the seams. Carrying it all in.

All so you can do it again a few days later … after you’ve used maybe 2 percent of everything you brought.

But I’m a planner. A worrier. A planning worrier. I’m so obsessive-compulsive that I keep detailed lists in order to manage my proliferation of detailed lists. That was certainly the case for this short, four-night trip designed to limit grocery store jaunts or anything that would take us out of the comfortable wilds and into the unknowns of civilization.

To achieve this feat was relatively easy. All I had to do was pack our entire house, plus our dog, into the back of our Toyota RAV4.